Re: [PATCH v2] x86: Start removing X86_X32_ABI

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2026, at 14:33, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> On 2026-07-08 13:26:45 [+0200], Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 8, 2026, at 09:36, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
>> > On 2026-07-08 08:31:30 [+0200], John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> >> > Since there is practically no real use for x32, start removing it by
>> >> > removing the symbol first, not allowing to enable it. Should nothing
>> >> > happening by the end of the year, it will removed after the last LTS
>> >> > kernel this year.
>> >> 
>> >> As mentioned before, there are still actively maintained Debian and Gentoo
>> >> ports of x32, so I guess the last paragraph is rather subjective.
>> >
>> > On the Debian ports side: lacks a browser like firefox or chromium. No
>> > native ocaml compiler. libreoffice is not present.
>> > Not once released in contrast to kFreeBSD.
>> >
>> > This does not look like healthy port that will become eventually a
>> > release architecture. To quote the introduction paragraph of ports.d.o:
>> > | The goal of this machine is to provide an infrastructure for unofficial
>> > | architectures until they are integrated in the main Debian archive.
>> 
>> x32 is a bit different since you can't have a pure x32 distro
> Why not?
...
>
> You simply lack a Debian installer/ boot+install medium. Some ports
> architectures to provide netboot images
> 	https://get.debian.org/images/ports/snapshots/2026-06-12/

As I understand, it's a policy in Debian for debian-installer and
the kernel packages to only provide kernels for the native
architecture, i.e. 64-bit x86 kernels are only packaged for
amd64 and not x32 or i686, and 64-bit Arm kernels are only
packaged for arm64 but not armhf or formerly armel.

It would of course be trivial to create a kernel package with a
64-bit kernel inside of an x32/armhf/armel .deb file, but that
would not be included as an official package.

>> always require you to start with a 64-bit installer. [for
>> different reasons though: armhf has an installer but its
>> kernel only works on 32-bit machines; i686 kernels can
>> theoretically run on older 64-bit hardware but Debian
>> no longer provides an installer for it]
>>
>> As far as I understand, the typical use case for debian-x32 is
>> to run just a single performance-critical application, either
>> using "dpkg --add-architecture" or mmdebstrap/schroot. I used
>> to do that for having a faster gcc a decade ago when I was using
>> x86 build machines, though these days that probably fails
>> due to the linker running out of virtual memory in large
>> configurations.
>
> The "problem" with not being part of the main distro ist that you can't
> have the packages say from Trixie and have security updates along with
> it. Instead you always track Sid or don't update.

This is also more a policy problem than a technical one.
Obviously one could build all Trixie (or Forky in the future)
source packages for x32 the same way that debian-ports today
contains Sid packages. I don't know if including those
in debian-ports would fundamentally changes that is run,
or if that just needs someone to do it.

      Arnd